The ‘stolen land’ hoax

Pro-Hamas protesters in New York City and elsewhere are perpetuating falsehoods to the extreme.

Leonard Grunstein | May 11, 2026

Efrat is located in the area known as Gush Etzion in Israel. Before 1948, the residents of the Gush were Jews residing in four thriving kibbutzim, known as Kfar Etzion, Massu’ot Yitzhak, Ein Tzurim and Revadim.

The land in the Gush was legally purchased. Much of it was purchased by Jewish individuals or organizations decades before the 1948 War of Independence.

Following the U.N. Partition Plan, the Gush was besieged by the Jordanian army and other Arab forces. On May 13, 1948, Kfar Etzion was invaded by the Jordanian army, and it fell. After the Jewish residents surrendered, a massacre took place. Only a handful survived the slaughter.

The surviving members of the other three kibbutzim were taken as prisoners of war to Jordan, and all four villages were razed to the ground. The area remained under Jordanian control and was entirely cleared of Jewish inhabitants until the defensive Six-Day War in 1967.

Many years ago, at an extended family wedding, I had the privilege of meeting one of the very few children who miraculously survived the massacre. He was all grown up then and was so happy to be able to engage with family. He was an orphan raised by an adoptive family; his mother and father sent him away to safety in one of the last transports out of the Gush. He thought he had no surviving relatives.

The Jordanian army and cohorts that invaded the Gush subsequently murdered them; they are among those memorialized in the Etzion Heritage Center.

Who can forget the Lamed Hey—35 brave Haganah soldiers on the way to the Gush to help defend the Jewish kibbutzim when they were ambushed by Arab forces and brutally murdered in the Elah Valley? They, like all the Jewish residents of the Gush who were murdered, became a symbol of heroic sacrifice.

Calling the Gush, including Efrat, stolen land is an absurd canard. The only ones who stole land were the Jordanian army, with Jordan treating it as state property. After Israel liberated it, the Gush became state land. No privately owned Arab property was confiscated.

The 1994 Israel-Jordan peace treaty established the Jordan River as the international border between the two nations. Jordan also officially renounced all claims to the areas it conquered on the west side of the Jordan River, which includes the Gush.

Efrat was one area that appealed to Jews at a program in New York City last November as part of an aliyah information session sponsored by Nefesh B’Nefesh, held at Park East Synagogue on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. It was that trigger and more than caused a now infamous near-riot outside as interested Jewish participants tried to enter the building.

For the second time in six months, masked pro-Hamas rioters tried to breach barriers around the entrance to Park East on May 5 to prevent people from entering, even attacking New York City police there to keep the calm. Those hoodlums were not only mocking the law; their excuse was that their behavior was in the name of Arabs whose land was stolen by Jews, which is patently false.

Thankfully, many Americans recognize the moral and societal disease of antisemitism, and they are willing to join in combating it. The veto-proof majority in the New York City Council that recently passed the buffer-zone law to protect houses of worship is a good example.

As Rabbi Dr. Lord Jonathan Sacks so poignantly said, “the hate that begins with Jews never ends with Jews.”

Now it’s time to scrupulously enforce the buffer-zone law and extend it to schools as well. The slogan “Never Again” must have tangible expression in genuine efforts to protect people from harm; in this case, the safety of students.

Leonard Grunstein is a retired attorney, banker and co-author of Because It’s Just and Right: The Untold Back-Story of the U.S. Recognition of Jerusalem as the Capital of Israel and Moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem. He is the founder and chairman of Project Ezrah, a nonprofit that supports those facing unemployment with job-search assistance and counseling. A descendant of Polish Holocaust survivors, he helped fund an archive on Jewish life in Poland through the YIVO Institute.

The article was first published on JNS and was forwarded by the author by email.